At this moment, a spacecraft is headed from Earth to Europa, an ice-veiled moon of Jupiter thought to contain an ocean similar in some ways to one of our own. NASA engraved a metal plate affixed to the spacecraft with a poem, commissioned from Ada Limón during her time as poet laureate of the United States. It reads, in part: And it is not darkness that unites us, not the cold distance of… Source At this moment, a spacecraft is headed from Earth to Europa, an ice-veiled moon of Jupiter tho...

Hello, It's Friday again Flipping more things Klonan After we introduced the concept of flipping back in 1.1 ( FFF-364 ), it became more and more annoying to have certain entities prevent flipping. While some things will always be impossible (Train stops, Rail signals, etc.), we do what we can. Pumpjack The Pumpjack was always a touch strange with the rotations, maybe it was adding to the puzzle, but these days we are more of the opinion it is just making things more awk...

A streamer’s desk holds the camera, lights, mic, and screens that shape every broadcast. The right layout keeps gear within reach and cables out of the shot. These five streamer desk setup ideas cover different rooms, budgets, and styles, so you can borrow what fits your space and ignore the rest. 1. Minimalist Streamer Desk Setup A clean desk reads well on camera. Stick to a neutral tabletop, one monitor on an arm, and a mic on a boom that swings out of frame when you stop talking. ...

A few weeks ago we looked at a simulation of technological evolution by economist Brian Arthur, in which he was able to start with simple building blocks (such as a NAND gate) and evolve surprisingly complex circuits (such as a 12-way AND gate or a 4-bit adder) by randomly combining increasingly useful existing components. We analyzed this as a way of simplifying a search problem: by using existing, working components as modules that can be combined, a few at a time, into more complex module...

These posts are Version 2 of this material. Please email me with feedback. Sex and Drugs and Guns and Code Restart A Little Psychology How We Got Here More Psychology When the Model is the Harm Privacy, Power, and the Self Bibliography How can you condense the millions of words that have been written about privacy into a blog post? The answer is that you can’t; all you can do is point at a few landmarks, like a tour guide trying to show people Toronto in an afternoon. ...

There are two ways to look at the P v NP problem, as a formal mathematically defined conjecture as a Clay Millennium Prize Problem, and as the more intuitive notion that everything efficiently verifiable is efficiently computable and the implications that has on our ability to compute. I've written considerably about how artificial intelligence has affected the latter. In particular, how AI and other advances in computing have brought us to this Optiland of getting most of the good implicati...

As part of the U.S. Marine Corps’ Aerial Logistics Connector (ALC) program that aims to provide logistics to distributed units in a contested environment, Shield AI, Airbus U.S. Space & Defense, L3Harris Technologies, and Parry Labs completed their fourth autonomous flight test period on the H145 helicopter. For the first time, the H145 flew with systems from all four companies fully integrated on the aircraft. During testing, Hivemind mission autonomy successfully detected landing zone obst...

LangChain recently posted about a database they built. I liked the post quite a bit, I thought it was pretty well written and did a really good job of explaining their architecture. It highlighted for me some of the interesting database challenges and workloads that are consequences of AI. This is an "observability database," which sits sort of outside the traditional OLTP/OLAP dichotomy, but leans a bit on the OLAP side. It exists to collect data from a bunch of different sources (in LangCh...

Apple FINALLY lets you turn on your Mac remotely , without having to press the power button. In the media, articles suggest it's a reaction to Mac mini power button complaints . While I agree the M4 mini's power button is in a really dumb spot, that's not why I care about this feature. The two bigger use cases for me have been a pain for years: Apple FINALLY lets you turn on your Mac remotely , without having to press the power button. In the media, articles suggest it's a reaction ...

After two days of experience with Claude Fable 5 I think the best way to describe it is relentlessly proactive . It knows a whole lot of tricks and it will deploy pretty much any of them to get to its goal. I'll illustrate this with an example. I was hacking on Datasette Agent today when I noticed a glitch: a horizontal scrollbar that shouldn't be there in the jump menu chat prompt. I snapped this screenshot: Then I started a fresh claude session in my datasette-agent checkout, dr...

Today we bid farewell to Ho Chi Minh City on our Vietnam 2026 trip for a couple of days to stay in Vũng Tàu on the coast. The small peninsula was a popular retreat for the French colonialists, and is famed within Vietnam for its seafood and large beach. HCMC has become so big that the Vũng Tàu is officially considered part of its metro area, but it still has its own distinct history, character, and charm. Before setting off, we had a salt coffee with condensed milk and a baguette from ...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Carl Barenbrug, whose blog can be found at carlbarenbrug.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let’s start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? A native Scotsman, albeit half German, ...

All tests were executed against Kafka 4.3.0 using Dimster.  In the last post Broker-Visible vs Client-Local Parallelism we looked at two ways of scaling Kafka consumption. The final unit of parallelism can be visible to the broker, as consumers, or it can be local to the client, as threads, virtual threads, async tasks, or some other execution mechanism hidden behind a smaller number of consumers.  Broker-visible parallelism is simple to reason about: if each consumer processes records seria...

The keyword in politics these days is ‘sovereign’. What few will admit is that it is effectively the adoption of the American strategy: Make America Great Again. In other words, reindustrialization of key sectors of the economy. The UK used to be a computing champion. Our chip designs (ARM) originated from the UK. Canada had BlackBerry, everyone was using Canadian phones. Like Canada, many countries have progressively slid into financialization. Huge banks and bank-related businesses, su...

Tigris is S3-compatible, which means you can point the AWS SDK at it and most things just work. The catch is that the Tigris-exclusive features—bucket forking, snapshots, object renaming, and the like—need verbose workarounds because the AWS SDK doesn't know they exist. So we wrote a Go SDK that does. It comes in two flavors: the storage package is a drop-in replacement for the standard S3 client with first-class methods for the Tigris-specific operations, and simplestorage is ...

A week in which some things happen and some things do not happen, much like other weeks.  Current situation: Not pictured: The 3 different kinds of beef jerky we just got at Buc-ee’s. The pain of having children who become driving teenagers is the exorbitant cost of auto insurance. The joy is getting to stare out the window as the midwestern landscape moves by and think about nothing and everything for hours at a time.  Monday 01 June: Dentist in ...

You know what the absolute worst part of owning an EV is? It's when you get in the car with the kids and there's 67% battery left. ⁶🤷⁷ Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . You know what the absolute worst part of owning an EV is? It's when you get in the car with the ...

I’ve been managing my dotfiles with GNU stow for a few years. I even wrote a piece with a corny title about that setup back in 2023. Stow served me well, but managing symlinks across multiple devices slowly became a pain in the butt. So I started looking around for a better tool and even considered writing my own. Then a colleague pointed me to chezmoi , and so far I’m liking it a lot. It does everything I need, and I’ve started tracking my agent skill files with it too. The ma...

This article is Part 5 of my series on India’s launch vehicle crisis. A space program can only move as swiftly and flexibly as its orbital rockets, and India has been amid a grinding halt. As such, I’ve been focusing my  Indian Space Progress  blog & newsletter on fully exploring this situation before resuming coverage of national space activities at large. Part 1  of the article series  reviewed the state of India’s orbital launch vehicles , revealing a bleak picture of ambitious go...

Inspired by the Bear Blog question challenge and other blogging challenges, I thought I would make my own: the Taylor Swift question challenge. The questions are orientated more toward people who have heard a few of her songs, but, no matter whether you have listened to one or all of her songs, I hope you find something interesting in this quiz! If you don’t feel like you can answer a question, feel free to skip it and/or add your own in its place. Here are the questions: What is the first ...

I have been a staunch supporter of Open Source for a long time, including experiments in funding it . I’m a true believer in the idea that Open Source always wins in the long run, but not automatically and not quickly. Right now it is being stressed by AI slop, shifting contributor dynamics, the falling cost of producing code, and large companies learning to close doors behind them. A lot of that battle today is manipulation of the narrative. Opinion makers on social media and in bu...

After five weeks in New Zealand, it was time for a change of scenery. Following my original plan and given the proximity, Australia was the obvious choice. However, I had to shorten my stay to reach Japan in time for the cherry blossoms. I decided to split the next two weeks between Melbourne and Sydney. I was also looking forward to finally slowing down and staying more than 1–2 nights in the same place (or so I thought 😅). Just a few days before my arrival, Melbourne was named the "...

In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-45447 for the project OpenSSL , site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix a heap use-after-free in PKCS7_verify(). This is due to the affected components being written in C, the only programming language where these vulnerabilities regularly happen. "This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there's nothing anyone ca...